Worse than gluttony

I saw an online image and followed the links to a place where it is used, though I don’t know where it originated. That place is the blog Theofrak and a post written by Welltraveledpair back in 2012.

The Church, likely the Catholic Church, created a list of Seven Deadly Sins. Supposedly, if a person committed these sins they would be condemned to Hell (or at least have a much harder time getting into Heaven). These sins are: wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony.

This particular writer asks: Seriously? “There is nothing worse than sloth and gluttony?”

The image I chased proposes the Real Seven Deadly Sins: “Apathy, Cruelty, Duplicity, Hypocricy, False Morality, Abuse of Power, and Cultivated Ignorance.”

A good list! But we’re not done. A few more worse than sloth and gluttony are proposed. Here are some of them:

Reism: The belief that humans beings are merely things, capable of becoming property.

Categorism: Inventing groupings for humans and assigning membership, then ranking individuals according to the supposed attributes of the groups.

Ethnocentrism: The belief that a particular ethnic group is superior to all others.

Chauvinism: The belief hat a political unit is superior to all others and worthy of absolute loyalty. It is a foundation of organized injustice.

Imperialism: The belief that it is right to impose the system and values of one group onto another.

Hmm.

The original list of sins all apply to individuals. They can be used by people in power to oppress others with spiritual violence – you do these things and you’re going to Hell!

And all the replacement sins, both the ones in the list of seven and the extra ones, are sins of those with power. They’re actions that cause oppression.

Not surprising they aren’t considered sins by those who created the original list.

Sins with a twist

Last night the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (for which I’ve had season tickets for about 35 years) performed The Seven Deadly Sins by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. In the 1920s Weill and Brecht and their Threepenny Opera was widely performed across Germany. But in 1933 Weill had to flee Berlin. In Paris he was able to get a commission for a new work, something to feature the estranged wife of a rich man. He and Brecht were reunited in one last testy partnership. Though the original is in German, this performance used an English translation.

The piece features a singer, sung by Storm Large in this performance, who is Anna I. In the original conception a dancer performs Anna II. We’re to understand these are two parts of one person. A male quartet sings the role of Family. The two Annas are sent out into the world to work to earn money so the family can build a new house in Louisiana beside the Mississippi River.

Because this is Brecht, there is a twist on each of the seven sins.

Anna II is told she is to shake off sloth and earn the money the family needs.

She has too much pride when she won’t strip and perform for the men who have paid to see her.

She is to refrain from anger because that might offend the casting directors in Los Angeles.

In Philadelphia, her contract forbids her to gain weight, so she had better not be a glutton.

In Boston she must keep her sugar daddy happy and not lust after the man she really wants.

She must not be greedy when performing in Baltimore, because patrons avoid greedy people.

In San Francisco, life may be fine, but one must not envy those who can’t be bought or whose wrath is kindled by injustice. Envy gets in the way of business.

Sins of preference around the country

Too much time on their hands? Professional geographers who want to stand out in a crowd? A fancy party trick? I won't try to answer those questions, only say that their efforts have mapped sinfulness across the country. They figured out how to quantify the Seven Deadly Sins within a population and colored the map by county accordingly. In case you don't remember those sins they are (with the method of quantifying it):

* Greed -- compare average income with number of residents below the poverty line.
* Envy -- thefts per capita.
* Wrath -- violent crimes per capita.
* Lust -- sexually transmitted diseases per capita.
* Gluttony -- fast food restaurants per capita.
* Sloth -- compare expenditures in entertainment and recreation with unemployment rate.
* Pride -- the combination of all the above.

The data is mapped two ways. The first shows the value of a sin with more sinful counties in darker colors. The second shows average counties in pale yellow, higher than average in red and below average in blue. The map for Pride (the combination) shows a red swath from eastern Texas, across the South, to New York City, another swath across California, and blotches in Washington state, southern Michigan, and around Kansas City (among others). There is also a blue swath covering most of West Virginia, Kentucky, Illinois (outside of Chicago), Iowa, Nebraska, half of Kansas and South Dakota, and all of North Dakota.

Most gay blogs show the map for Lust, noting the bright red blotch covering the South.